Good
Morning Ladies and Gentleman and thank you for being here so early this morning
to hear me talk about Jacques Lusseyran and several other blind heroes of the
French Resistance during the Second World War. I would like to thank Hannah for
enabling me to speak to you in French and providing this translation so that
you can follow what I am saying.

It
is an honour for me to have been invited to take part in this magnificent
colloquium whose theme, the relationship between blindness and creativity, has
brought together blind and non-blind researchers, creators, accessibility
practitioners as well as artists, writers, musicians and sculptors from around
the world. I am delighted that, thanks to the huge amount of work undertaken by
Hannah and Vanessa, the network which was created by the 2013 Paris colloquium
has not only been maintained but also developed and extended to other countries
- Finland, Slovenia, Australia, India, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina - which
were not represented in 2013.

Dear
Hannah, in my role as ‘doyenne des etudes sur la cécité’ [‘queen of blindness
studies’] as you once referred to me, I thank you with all my heart for having
convinced me to come and arranged things so that I could.

To be honest, I was supposed to speak on a completely different subject, the sighted wives of blind creators, using three examples :

One from the
nineteenth century:

Julie
de Quérangal (1802-1844), the wife of French Romanticist historian Augustin
Thierry, who was hugely successful in his lifetime before he was eclipsed for
posterity by the glory of Michelet;

And
Yvonne Belamri, born in 1927, widow of the Franco-Algerian French language story
teller, poet and novelist Rabah Belamri, whose work was tragically cut short by
his sudden death at the age of 49, 20 years ago next September 28.

These
three women, who were all extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, played an
essential part in the success of their husbands, far beyond the traditional
role of reader and secretary usually taken on by partners of blind
intellectuals, and it was this that I was hoping to illuminate.

But
events in the French publishing world, as well as ceremonies commemorating the
work of the French Resistance and the French Deportations during the Second
World War have reminded me of my fascination with Jacques Lusseyran (1924-1971),
whose astonishing work and life I discovered in the 1990s.

The
publishing event was the publication in Gallimard’s prestigious
« Collection blanche » of a wonderful book by Jérôme Garcin on
Jacques Lusseyran: Le Voyant, which
came out on 1st January 2015.

Jérôme Garcin is
a very well-known French journalist, literary critic and writer who is
especially recognised for his work on a famous arts radio programme, Le masque et la plume, which he has been
hosting on Sunday evenings on France-Inter for 26 years. He has received
numerous prizes for his writing, notably, in 2013, the Grand prix Henri-Gal
awarded by the Institut de France.

Garcin
discovered the life and works of Jacques Lusseyran in 2005, when publishing
house Le Félin, who had just reprinted Lusseyran’s best-known work: Et la lumière fut, [And there wasLight]sent him a copy to review in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, of which he is culture editor.

Garcin’s
experience of reading Lusseyran, which he described as « un choc fondateur » [a
fundamental shock], encouraged him to devote himself to finding out more about
this exceptionally intelligent blind man who was also a young hero forgotten by
his country, an illuminating writer and a talented teacher who only achieved
recognition once he moved to the States. Garcin met his daughter Claire, who
gave him access to a forgotten part of her father’s works, books that had gone
out of print, as well as a pile of unpublished works, including novels and
short stories…. And so, after becoming ‘inhabited’ by this brotherly figure for
years, Garcin finally wrote a passionate biography which he described as an « exercice d’admiration.» [an exercise in
admiration].

All
this to say that this generous and emotional tribute has touched a wide audience
who appreciates its hopeful message – as demonstrated by reader testimonies:

« enfin vous nous faites connaître quelqu’un
qu’on va lire tout de suite, dont on a besoin aujourd’hui », [finally
you have introduced us to someone whose books we are going to read
straightaway, whom we need right now]

And the work
became an exceptional publishing success: 14 print runs of 65 000 copies
since 1st January, leading to increased interest in the works of this blind man
who was sighted until the age of 7 and a half, and who dared to say and write
that becoming blind was « [son] plus
grand bonheur» [his greatest happiness].

As
for the commemorative events which inspired me to give up on my initial subject:
there were 2 commemorative plaques unveiled recently to celebrate blind
resistance workers: the first, on 25 November 2014. at the Institut national
des jeunes aveugles in Paris, and the second, on 15 April 2015. at the Fédération
des Aveugles et handicapés visuels de France – which holds the archives of the Union
des aveugles de la Résistance, created on the 22 December 1945 by Charles
Davin, a First World War veteran who was involved in the Resistance in the Second
World War.

These
2 plaques contain the names of 132 blind resistance workers, 9 women and 123
men, 2 of whom were shot and 4 of whom, including Lusseyran, were deported.
This latter is therefore not THE blind resistance worker, as the dust jacket of
Garcin’s book erroneously puts it, but ONE OF the blind resistance workers, as
the subtitle of the English translation of Et
la lumière fut reveals: « And there
was light: the extraordinary memoir of a
blind hero of the French resistance in World War II », republished in March
2014 in the US by New World Library.

Therefore,
before speaking to you about Jacques Lusseyran, I will evoke in the first part
of this paper, some of those other blind resistance workers to whom Charles
Davin, founder and first president of the Union des aveugles de la Résistance –
of which Lusseyran was vice-president – devoted a little book which came out in
1953, called la « Bataille des Ombres »,
[The Battle of the Shadows] which describes « la lutte clandestine entreprise, pendant l’occupation du pays par
l’Allemagne hitlérienne, par des aveugles […] qui ont participé, eux aussi,
dans la Résistance, à la libération de la France ». [The secret struggle
undertaken during the Nazi occupation of the country, by blind people who also
participated, via their work for the Resistance, in the liberation of France].

But
perhaps you are wondering what this talk on a resoundingly political subject, that
is, the participation of blind men and women in the secret resistance networks and
operations working in France during the Second World War to end the occupation
by the enemy and their collaborators from the armistice of 22 June 1940 to the Liberation
of France (6 June 1944 - 8 May1945), is doing in a conference on the
relationship between blindness and creativity.

Well,
the reason is, that I believe that resistance workers needed not only courage,
dignity, calmness, and skill but also a resoundingly creative mind in order to
participate in a very diverse range of clandestine actions which included
gathering and disseminating information, transporting documents, weapons and
radios, intercepting phone calls, producing false ID papers, creating and
distributing secret leaflets and newspapers, helping escaped prisoners or
wanted suspects etc., all of which involved continually risking one’s life. The
historian Jacqueline Martin-Bagnaudez, author of a 2006 article in the journal Histoire et archives: « Aveugles et
résistants » speaks relatedly of an « imagination inventive » [inventive imagination].

Two of these blind
resistance workers paid for their commitment with their life. A Breton, François
Guillou, who was shot on the 17 January 1944 in Plomelin, (Finistère) at the
age of 26, for having sabotaged telegraph wires used by the occupying forces,
and Louis Adam, shot on the 16 June 1944, aged 41, along with 29 other
resistance workers held, like him, at Montluc Prison in Lyon – (including the
great French historian Marc Bloch) - at Saint-Didier-de-Formans, a hamlet
situated to the north of Lyon (Ain), in a place known as « Les
Roussilles ». In 1946 a monument in
memory of this massacre was built, and Louis Adam’s name has pride of place
there. He was a humble brush maker from Normandy who had set himself up in the
Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne, and who, as a member of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
Français, along with his wife Marguerite, hosted meetings of the local military
wing of the F.T.P.F. at his home, where weapons and leaflets were seized.

On
11 July 1944, less than a month after the Les Roussilles massacre, Louis Adam’s
wife, Marguerite Pérussel, born in 1892 at Saint-Etienne, was deported to Neue
Bremm, a Gestapo hard labour camp, and thence to Ravensbrück. According to the Livre Mémorial des Déportés de France, she
died on 4 June 1945 in Hamburg, a litle over a month after the liberation of
Ravensbrück. In La bataille des ombres,
Charles Davin emphasises the courage of the partners of blind resistance
workers who willingly risked as much as their husbands and who sometimes followed
them to the grave.

Apart
from François Guillou and Louis Adam, who died for France, 3 blind men and one
partially blind woman paid dearly for their commitment to the French Resistance :
Arthur Poitevin, born in 1917 in Port-en-Bessin, (Basse-Normandie), was a music
teacher and organist at Saint Patrice in Bayeux and a member of Jeunesses
Maritimes Chrétiennes and a resistance network in Bessin which made and
distributed false identity papers. He was deported Nacht und Nebel [Night and Fog ie without a trace] on 11 November
1943, with three other members of his network, first to the Natzweiler-Struthof
Camp in Alsace, and then to Dachau on the 4 September 1944; André Mahoux, born in 1909 in Cherbourg (Basse-Normandie)
was deported to Buchenwald on the 17 janvier 1944 ; Jacques Lusseyran, born
on the 19 September 1924, was also deported to Buchenwald in the next convoy,
on the 22 January and Irène Ottelard, (née Bloncourt), born on the 5 February
1922 in Lille, who worked at Drancy Town Hall, was deported to Ravensbrück on
the 18 April 1944 for having distributed false ID cards. All of them returned
to France: Arthur Poitevin, arrived back in Paris on 16 May 1945 and was home in
Bayeux the following day, where his young wife was waiting for him ;
Jacques Lusseyran, arrived home at his parents’ house in Paris on the 23 April 1945;
Irène Ottelard, came back to Paris in the same transport as Marie-Claude
Vaillant-Couturier- who stayed in Ravensbrück
after its liberation on the 30 April 1945 by the Red Army, until all the French
patients had been evacuated – as for André Mahoux, it seems that after some
kind of intervention, he was liberated by the German authorities on the 19 March
1944, after 3 months at Buchenwald.

Sadly,
after having 4 children, Marc in 1946, Odile in 1947, then twin boys, Jacques
and Jean, in 1950, Arthur Poitevin died in 1951, aged 34, from a heart disease
probably caused by the ‘treatment’ administered by the Nazi doctors at Dachau, to
typhus patients. He did have time to dictate to his wife Raymonde, in 1946, a
heart-wrenching testimony of his years of deportation which was given to me, as
well as to Mme Noëlle Roy, curator of the musée Valentin Haüy, by M. Philippe
Lumbroso, a long-time friend of Arthur Poitevin’s grand-son, Grégoire,
and a volunteer at the Groupement des Intellectuels Aveugles et Amblyopes. One
day I would like to publish a critical edition of this text together with a
historian of the Resistance and Deportation.

Given
the focus of this colloquium on blindness and artistic creation, I would like
to emphasize here that when he was held at Struthof, in block 10 where –
uniquely in this camp - the block leader, Roger Kauthen, a great Luxembourgeois
musician and leader of the camp orchestra, would distribute musical instruments, Arthur Poitevin would play accordion
or violin and would sing for his friends
on Saturdays during the musical evenings which only took place in this block –
clearly without the knowledge of the SS – as François Guérin and Marcel
Leclerc, two compatriots of Arthur’s held in the same block, testify. It is
under these circumstances that he composed, on 17 January 1944 a song of hope, La Voix du Rêve, which became a kind of camp
‘hymn’ and which is still sung each year at the memorial ceremonies which take
place at the Struthof deportation monument.

It
is nonetheless important to remember that Struthof Camp, which was run by the
SS Josef Kramer, and where prisoners were greeted with the macabre
sentence: 'Here, you come in through the door and leave through the
chimney’ was just as awful as the other
camps. It was a Category III camp, which meant that it was one of the
strictest: 22,000 out of its 52,000 prisoners died there. There was a gallows, a gas chamber and a
crematorium as well as Nazi medical professors from the University of the Reich
in Strasbourg who would carry out medical ‘experiments’ on the detainees.

But
Arthur Poitevin and his friends from block 10 were lucky that their kapo was a
musician, and more humane than the majority of block leaders ; they were
also lucky that he protected Arthur because he was blind and because he was a
musician, notably by letting him off hard labour.

As
for Irène Ottelard, she only avoided death thanks to the beauty of her voice. Unlike most of her fellow prisoners of the smalll Uckermark-Jugendlager camp, she survived. The camp, which
was situated a few thousand metres from Ravensbrück was where old, ill and infirm
women, those women who could no longer work, were collected, from 15 January
1945, in order that they be killed by hunger (bread and soup rations
halved); thirst, fatigue, the cold (roll calls where they had to stand to
attention for 6 or 7 hours in very little clothing - their coats and stockings
had been taken away when they arrived) promiscuity, vermin, the total absence
of hygiene and medical care. The ill and the infirm women of Jugendlager who
survived despite this regime, or who didn’t die quicky enough, were sent to the
Revier, (camp infirmary), where the blockova
Vera Salvequart, a beautiful and intelligent 25-year-old nurse with a sweet
voice, would eliminate every day, with the help of two SS medics, a certain
number of patients by giving them a white powder or a lethal injection. Others
were chosen for ‘black transports’ from which they never returned, until a gas
chamber was built near the camp.

Well,
Irène Ottelard, who was very visually impaired and whose lack of treatment left
her almost completely blind, and who also had an infected wound on her left leg
which Docteur Treite, a doctor with the military grade of captain at the Ravensbruck Camp, also refused to treat,
was one of the very few prisoners sent to the infirmary at Uckermark who were
spared by the dreadful Vera. She and several others were excused medical checks
in exchange for services: Irène was to sing songs which Salvequart liked,
others embroidered her white coat, mended her clothes or helped her with her admin
tasks ; one such helper was Gisela Krüger, a German prisoner whose leg Dr
Treite had amputated and who kept a secret diary in which she made a note of
everything which went on at the infirmary.

The
only thing was, as Germaine Tillion reminds us in her third book on Ravensbrück,
« cette étrange
« infirmière » devait avoir un certain nombre de mortes chaque jour,
et elle choisissait selon ses humeurs celles de ses malades auxquelles elle
ferait avaler de force la fameuse poudre blanche » [this strange
‘nurse’ had to have certain number of deaths per day and she chose depending on
her moods which of her patients she would force to swallow the famous white
powder’] unless she gave them an injection instead..... Thus the « protégées » of today
could be tomorrow’s victims if that was necessary to reach the ‘quota’. We can only
imagine how hard it must have been for poor Irène, in this terrifying
atmosphere, to have to sing for the very woman who had administered the hateful
white powder to Gaby, her bunk-bed mate and who had also killed another of her
friends with an injection. But she had to try and survive in order to bear
witness to what went on at Uckermark, and in particular at the infirmary
which Irène finally left in mid-April to be taken back to the big camp –
weighing only 29 kilos - with around
1000 other survivors out of the 6000 women who had been imprisoned at Uckermark.

She
testified in December 1946, along with 2 other prisoners who had been spared by
the fearsome Salvequart, at the first of 7 Ravensbrück trials, which took place
in Hamburg from the 5 December 1946 to the 3 February 1947. In the book which
she has just written on Ravensbrück, British historian Sarah Helm, who had
access to the trial archives, recounts this episode which cannot fail to move
us:

« So personal was Irène Ottelard’s hatred of
Dr Treite that on the witness stand Irene – nearly blind – asked for a guiding
hand so she could step down and approach the dock in order to look him in the
eye. Treite’s refusal to treat her infected leg had meant she was selected for
the Youth Camp, “where people laid about and died.”»

Vera
Salvequart, who was sentenced to death along with 10 others, including 5
doctors (an eleventh, also a doctor, died of a heart attack during the trial) –
was executed on 2 June 1947. Dr Percy Treite, who was also sentenced to death,
killed himself on the 8 April.

Alongside
these blind resistance workers who were all victims of Nazi brutality, I will
mention one more blind resistance worker who was awarded, on 2 August 1999, the
« Juste parmi les Nations » medal. I am talking about a Dominican
monk, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin (1905-2002), who, as soon as the 1940 Armistice
was declared, first in Marseille and then in Montpellier, helped Jews and
German refugees opposed to the Nazi regime whom, according to the armistice
agreement, France had agreed to deliver to Germany.

Father
Perrin devoted a chapter of his autobiography Comme un veilleur attend l’aurore (1998) to these war years. He was
imprisoned in August 1943 in Montpellier, after a denunciation, but he was
released reasonably quickly because of lack of evidence. He quotes a comment which
was reported to him by someone working in Montpellier police headquarters, and
which speaks volumes about the danger he was in: «Le Père Perrin, on l’a relâché, mais on aura sa peau ». [Father
Perrin: we had to let him go, but we will get him.’]

Thus
forewarned, he took the necessary measures and went into hiding in Aix-en-Provence
until the Allies landed on the Mediterranean coast in 1944.

With
the exception of Jacques Lusseyran about whom I am going to speak to you now, I
do not yet know very much about the other blind resistance workers because I
have not yet been able to gain access to the U.A.R archives.

Only
3 of them were still alive on 25 November 2014, when the commemorative ceremony
took place at l’Inja : firstly I will mention M. Roger-François Clapier,
to date the last president of the Union des aveugles de la Résistance, who now
lives in Marseille. In an interview published in 2006 in Les Chemins de la Mémoire, he described how, at the beginning of
the new academic year of 1940, with some fellow students, he had begun to « faire quelque chose » [do
something] as the phrase went, before joining a more ‘serious’ Resistance
network, the Office Strategic Service, where
he took part in various initiatives including making false identity papers, and,
thanks to an uncle who worked at the port of Marseille, passing details of all
port activity on to the Resistance. Then, after some of his friends had been
arrested and shot at Signes, he went into hiding at the home of some Resistance
friends near Avignon with whom he took part in attacks on retreating German
soldiers and helped secure the lower Durance valley, an action for which he
later received a medal. Subsequently, after defending his thesis on economic
history at the university of ’Aix-en-Provence in 1954, Roger-François Clapier had
a brilliant career as a professor at this same university.

The
two other blind resistance fighters who survived this heroic time are M. Denis
Pons and M. Aimé Daly; this latter was the only one who was well enough to make
the journey to l’INJA and who came, with his wife, to the 25 November ceremony,
during which he made a very moving speech.

Jacques Lusseyran may not be the only blind hero of the French
Resistance but he is the best known. On the one hand, this is because, despite
his youth – he was 16 in 1940 – he very quickly played a key role in one of the
most important networks of the occupied Northern Zone: Défense de la France,
« dont l’action résume la palette
des activités clandestines» [whose actions cover the whole range of
clandestine actions] : distributing an underground newspaper, making false
identity papers, sabotaging, and, from 1944, running two important maquis – but,
by this time, Jacques Lusseyran, who was arrested on the 20 July 1943 and
deported the 22 January 1944 with a number
of his colleagues from Défense de la France, was no longer on the management
committee which had become divided about the relevance of these kinds of
actions.

On the other hand, even though Jérôme Garcin welcomed him into his
personal Panthéon of forgotten heroes, Jacques Lusseyran was not completely
unknown before the publication of LeVoyant, because he described his life,
his experiences of blindness and his political commitments in a collection of
remarkable works which testify to a real writerly talent and reveal an
exceptional personality. But it is true, and here Jérôme Garcin is right to
criticise the way his work was forgotten by his own country, that Lusseyran – notably
thanks to his brilliant career in America and the publication of his works in
English and in German, was better known in the anglo-saxon world than in
France, where, happily, this trend is changing, thanks to Garcin’s important
work..

Jacques Lusseyran was born in Paris on the 19 September 1924, on the
slopes of Montmartre, in the 18th arrondissement, into a middle-class family:
his father, Pierre Lusseyran, originally from the Landes, had a degree in
Physics and Chemistry and worked as a chemical engineer. His mother, Germaine (née
Diard) was born in Juvardell in Anjou, and studied physics and biology after
having been a primary school teacher in her local area. Both were strong
believers in Rudolf Steiner’s theories of anthroposophie.

At the beginning of his autobiography, Et la lumière fut, which is also his best known work, Jacques
Lusseyran pays hommage to his parents :

[My parents were my protection, my
confidence, my warmth. [...]
They carried me. This is no doubt why, throughout my childhood, my feet
never touched the ground. My parents were my sky. I knew that through them an
Other was looking after me, talking to me. [...] This was the beginnings of my religion.
And this explains, I think, why I have never known metaphysical doubt.

This is where my audaciousness
came from. I would run to meet everything which was visible and everything
which was not yet so. I went from confidence to confidence as if in a relay
race.]

Jacques was a joyful child who would gallop around the paths of the
Champs de Mars and the pavements of the narrow streets around his home in the
7th arrondissemnt, where his parents moved after his birth. As a child he was extremely
attentive to sounds and smells and fascinated by light :

[No phenomenon, not even sounds which I nonetheless listened to with
such care, had the same importance for me as light.]

This child who
was so full of confidence in life suddenly went blind aged 7 and a half.

The terrible accident happened on the morning of 3 May 1932, at the
primary school on rue Cler. As all the children were rushing out of the
classroom for break, an older child knocked into him from behind. Little
Jacques lost his balance and banged into one of the corners of his teacher’s
desk. As he was wearing glasses, the violent
collision pushed one of his glasses’ arms into his right eye and pulled
it out. The retina of the left eye was also damaged. The next morning, after a
terrible night of pain, nightmares and fever, Jacques lost both his eyes and
became completely and definitively blind.

For the first few weeks, he felt like everything was « épuisé,
éteint », [exhausted, extinguished]; he became terrified and felt as
if « un instant le monde perdu. » [‘for
a moment the world was lost’]

And
then suddenly he had a revelation : « Cessant de mendier aux
passants le soleil », [stopping begging passers-by for sunshine], the
child looked inwards and found sunshine there instead. « il éclatait là
dans ma tête, dans ma poitrine, paisible, fidèle. [...] Je le reconnus,
soudain amusé, je le cherchais au-dehors quand il m’attendait chez moi. »
[It was shining there in my head,
in my chest, peaceful, faithful. I recognised it and was suddenly amused: I had
been looking for it outside when it was waiting for me inside myself]. Along
with this interior light, Jacques developed a coloured vision of people and
things which helped him rediscover joy. But, in order to live a normal life and
continue with his schooling, Jacques, with the tireless help of his mother –
who refused to send him to a school for the blind - , had to learn how to read
Braille and how to deploy his other senses, and especially how to overcome the
obstacles put in his way by the sighted world’s incomprehension of him.

This was in fact, according to him, and I should also note in passing, according
to me, where the ‘shadows of the blind’ were really found: « Qu’on le
veuille ou non, la cécité n’est pas bien reçue dans le monde des voyants ;
elle est si mal connue et, on le dirait parfois, si redoutée ! Aussi
commence-t-elle toujours par l’isolement. » [Whether we like it or
not, blindness is not well received in the sighted world : it is terribly
misunderstood, even feared. Therefore blindness
always starts with isolation.] In
addition to his interior vision, it was the love of his parents, the friendship
of his peers, his passion for music and literature and his holidays in Juvardeil
– in his mother’s family home, which lit up Jacques Lusseyran’s youth.

Besides his childhood friends, real friendship came into his life when
he met Jean Besniée, in 1935, at the lycée Montaigne. The two boys shared
everything and were inseparable from primary school to university. They were
only separated by deportation and the subsequent death of Jean.

With the rise of fascism in Germany and the beginning of the war, much
more terrifying shadows than blindness took hold of Europe. Jacques Lusseyran, who
loved German language and culture, followed the rise of the Nazis with horror
by listening to German radio and then during a short trip to Stuttgart with his
father in 1938.

In June 1940, when they were in their penultimate year of high school in
Toulouse, where Pierre Lusseyran had been mobilised as an officer-engineer at
the gunpowder factory in Empalot, and where his wife and children, as well as Jean
Besniée and his mother had soon joined them, - Jacques and Jean heard de
Gaulle’s call to arms. They decided, without yet knowing how or when, to become
soldiers fighting for a Free France. On
the 1st October as they were returning to Paris, the idea of Resistance
began to take shape as they began studying philosophy at Louis-le-Grand with a
new teacher, Pierre Favreau, who did not hide his anti-Nazi sentiments. Eight
months later, blind adolescent Jacques, established a resistance movement for
students at Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV. They created a central committee and
he was chosen as leader of the movement, and put in complete charge of
recruitment because, according to his friends, his blindness gave him « le
sens des êtres » [the sense of others]. One of the members of
the group, a certain Jacques Oudin, became his deputy..

The movement quickly grew in size and christened itself with the superb
title « Volontaires de la liberté ». Amongst its members we should
mention Jean Besniée, Jacques Oudin, Jean Sennelier and Pierre Bizos, who all
died during their deportation. The movement’s founding mission was to change
public opinion by distributing leaflets and news reports. In March 1942, these
reports became a small newspaper, with the incisive title Le Tigre, in
memory of Clemenceau. In October 1942, Jacques began
his university studies (en khâgne), at the same time as the movement’s
activities continued to grow – which demonstrates his extraordinary
intellectual capabilities and his powerful work ethic. In January 1943, Jacques Lusseyran and Jacques Oudin met
Philippe Viannay, the founder of Défense de la France, which was publishing a
fortnightly clandestine newspaper, with a print run of 10,000, whose aim was
above all « le réveil des
consciences» (‘awakening consciences]’, and which had the largest
circulation of any clandestine publication. They agreed to provide Défense de
la France with some soldiers to help in the distribution of the newspaper. Two
members of the management committee of the Volontaires de la Liberté, Pierre
Cochery et Jean-Louis Bruch, refused to accept their decision and this led to
the defection of a part of the membership which became affiliated with other
groups, such as Libération-Nord, Franc-Tireur, and especially with the Bourgogne
network. The other members followed Jacques Lusseyran and Jacques Oudin, who
became members of the management committee of Défense de la France. Lusseyran was
given national responsability for distribution, helped by Oudin, who became his
Argus, ready to « annoncer tous les dangers que les yeux perçoivent
seuls. » [Ready to announce all those dangers only visible to the eyes.]

The only common belief shared by members of Défense de la France was
« la survivance des valeurs chrétiennes », [the survival of Christian values]
but with no reference to a particular kind of Christianity. Lusseyran called
himself a Christian « de toute [sa] foi», [with all his heart] but wasn’t a
member of any particular church. 3
months after the members of the Volontaires de la Liberté joined, the circulation
of Défense de la France had doubled and the newspaper was being
distributed all over France. For the 14 July issue, they organised a huge
distribution operation in the Parisian metro. For this special issue, Jacques,
using the pseudonyme «Vindex », wrote an article called « 14
juillet, fête de la liberté », [14 July : a celebration of
freedom] where he called on the French moral conscience. The operation was a
brilliant success, thanks to flawless organisation and the astonishing courage
and stoicism of the 27 distribution teams who worked from early morning to late
afternoon.

In the meantime, Jacques suffered a huge set-back with devastating
consequences for his professional future. On the 1 July 1942 Pierre Laval’s
government published a decree, signed by Abel Bonnard (Education Minister), Pierre
Cathala (Finance Minister) and Raymond Grasset (Health Secretary) and followed
on 2 July by a statement, regarding « Conditions
physiologiques requises des candidats à un emploi dans l’enseignement
secondaire » [Physiological Conditions Required of Candidates Seeking
Employment in Secondary Education] which banned various categories of sick and
infirm people – including blind people – from the recruitment process for jobs
in secondary education. On the advice of his teachers, Jacques requested and
obtained a waiver from the Minister for Higher Education and on 30 May 1943, he
began preparing for the entrance exams. The following day, he received a letter
from Abel Bonnard informing him that the minister had not ratified the waiver
and ordering him to stop taking the exams. Here was the young hero of the
Resistance, for whom blindness had always been « pleine de sens » [full of sense] categorised
as incapable.

Nonetheless, he continued with his spiritual reflections and one evening
he had a mystical experience which was dominated by feelings of peace and
happiness, as well as the certainty that death was only a beginning. In fact,
the theme of death would recur often in his conversations. Was that really so
surprising for young men who were risking their life on a daily basis? « Nous
avions peur en ce temps-là. N’allez pas vous
imaginer autre chose ! Nous étions passionnés, mais nous n’étions pas fous ». [We were scared in those days, don’t imagine that we
weren’t: we were passionate about the cause but we weren’t mad!] On 20 July
1943, at around 5am, this fear became very real: 6 armed German officers came
to arrest him at his home. They took him to rue des
Saussaies, Gestapo HQ. During
his interrogation, Jacques learnt that 14 of his friends, including his alter
ego Jean, had also been arrested. On reading his file, « un dossier de
délation sans une faille» [a
watertight denunciation] he was able to guess who had betrayed him : Elio
(Emile Marongin), a medical student recruited to the cause in May via a
recommendation and responsible for distribution in the Nord. Neither his voice
nor his handshake had appealed to Jacques who, for the first time, had had some
doubts about recruiting him, but the recommendation came from on high and was
important. After being imprisoned at Fresnes for 6 months, Jacques was
transported, on 16 January 1944, to the Compiègne-Royallieu Camp with several
other supporters of Défense de la France. On 22 January, he was taken on transport
I 172, from Compiègne to Buchenwald, where he became number 41978.

Against all expectations, Jacques managed to survive in this place of
dereliction and death. What saved him, first and foremost, was his knowledge of
German, as well as the presence of his friends from Défense de la France. But,
at the end of February, they were called up « commando », and Jacques, who was left alone at Buchenwald, in
the « Petit Camp », thought
that this would be the end. He was scared of the other prisoners who stole his
bread and his soup. But his blindness does enable him to avoid the hard labour
commandos which killed so many of his friends. Two or three years earlier,
being deemed incapable of physical work would have been a death sentence but
since then the Nazis had invented a less radical but just as awful system; they
grouped all the ill, infirm and disabled people together in one block. As well
as the ill and the disabled, this group included everyone over 70 or under 16
as well as beggers, homosexuals and the insane: in fact a demographic not
unlike the indescribable mixture of humanity which would once have been found
in public hospices in every major European city and who became the butt of the
extremely hierarchical social structure which was found in a concentration
camp. The block was overcrowded and people died there so regularly that any
kind of official count was impossible. At the end of March, Jacques became very
ill. Two of his friends, Louis, a one-legged French man, and Pavel, a one-armed
Russian, took him to the Revier. At
the infirmary they weren’t treating people: they were leaving them to either
die or wait for an impossible cure. Jacques was close to death when his illness
took him « dans un autre monde » [into another world]: just like after the accident
which made him blind, he accepted that LIFE could save his life and on 8 May,
whereas everyone thought it was too late, he came out of the hospital « décharné,
hagard, mais guéri. » [emaciated; haggard but cured].

After this, he spent the next 11 months in the camp looking after
others. Many people called him ‘The Blind Frenchman’ and as such hundreds of
people confided in him. He would also listen to and decipher the announcements
coming from the block’s loud speakers which would broadcast German radio
programmes, before going round block after block explaining them to the
prisoners, thus fighting his own war against mis-information. Through this
whole time, the image of Jean never left him. Indeed it was as if Jean had been
watching over him during his illness. For Jean was dead. Jacques learnt this
the day before he fell ill. Jean died of exhaustion almost at Buchenwald’s
gates – after three weeks spent at Neue Bremm, a Gestapo
torture camp, and 23 days of train travel from station to station and from
siding to siding.

The
last days of the camp arrived. On
11 April 1945, when the third American Army liberated Buchenwald, they found
20,000 starving men there. 24,000 others had been taken east the previous day
by SS Guards who shot them during the journey. On 18 April, Jacques suddenly
heard a voice calling his name : it was Philippe Viannay, the leader of Défense
de la France, who had come to get his men back, at least those who were still
at Buchenwald, and still alive : there were only 3 of them. On
15 avril, Jacques wrote to his parents. A copy of this letter – written in pencil by a hastily found scribe –
was given to me by Pascal Lusseyran,Jacques’s brother. It
contained a supremely moving sentence : « J’ai appris ici à aimer la vie et
vous aimer plus que jamais ». [Here I learnt to love life and to love you even more than ever.]

Back in France he was reunited with his friends from Défense de la France,
at least those who had survived and on 20 September 1945, aged 21, he married, Jacqueline
Pardon, an old friend from the management committee, and 3 years his senior. They
had 3 children: Jean-Marc, (November 1946) ;
Claire, (July 1948) and Catherine
(November 1950) but they ended up getting divorced in July 1954.

The euphoria of having returned to France was soon overwhelmed by
disappointment, as was indeed the case for many deported resistance workers who
were astonished by the indifference of their peers who did not want to hear
them talk about what they had experienced and were incapable of appreciating
the extent of their suffering. They also felt let down by the way their country
had betrayed the ideals for which they had made so many sacrifices. Let us
listen to what Arthur Poitevin, wrote on this subject in the last chapter of
his Journal, entitled« Après la tourmente » :

[Where are the reforms which should have come out of this terrible
experience? Where is the brotherhood which should have been forged through
suffering? Where is the honesty which should now take precedence in all
transactions? Public services are working with a slowness which is coupled with
incurable stupidity. The best placed businesses are those who did the most
business with the occupying forces. The black market is still poisoning public
life. As for justice [...] we were overjoyed to be back; now we are disgusted.]

Jacques Lusseyran experienced all the feelings explored by Poitevin.

A crisis triggered by the former clandestine newspaper, which had become
an mainstream newspaper - France-Soir – edited by Pierre Lazareff, erupted
at the heart of the former resistance movement. Jacques resigned from the
association and from its board of directors in 1947 but he kept his shares in France-Soir, until a plot byPierre Lazareff and Aristide Blank, director
of France-Soir, designed to save the
paper from bankrupcy, ended up giving Hachette control of the paper by getting
rid of all the former resistance fighters who were obliged to give up their
shares to Blank for much less than their true value.

In addition the fact that the 1942 decree was still in place prevented
him from being able to take either entrance exams for the École normale
supérieure or the agrégation. His spiritual weapons, which had allowed the
young blind man to brilliantly overcome his disability and resist Nazi terror,
were no match for the stagnancy of a stupid system. As the years he had spent
studying literature (1941-3) counted for the equivalent of the first 2 years of
university study, he studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne between 1945 and 1947
after which he went back to the Education Minister and again asked to be
allowed to take the teaching exams (l’agrégation).
On 15 September 1947, he wrote to his friend Lapierre to tell him that he had
« enfin obtenu de Naegelen l’autorisation
de préparer l’agrégation », [finally obtained from Naegelen permission to take the exams]
which would give him « le droit de
prétendre au titre d’agrégé » [the right to call himself an agrégé] – which could be useful for his
future career - « mais nullement
celui d’enseigner dans le secondaire » [but not the right to teach in
a secondary school]. He therefore decided to work
towards « l’agrégation la moins
inaccessible pour [lui] : celle
d’Allemand ». [the least inaccessible agrégation for him :
German]. We do not know if he
ever ended up taking the exams. Whatever the case, unlike Arthur Poitevin, who was a music teacher before the war and who
took up his post again in 1945 « avec un succès inespéré » [with
unexpected success], Jacques Lusseyran, who was unable to work as a teacher,
absolutely had to find a job. Pierre Favreau, a former teacher of his at
Louis-le-Grand (and a Mason), found him a place as a philosophy teacher at the
Lay Mission in Salonica, Greece which was in the middle of a civil war. He
spent a difficult year there with Jacqueline (1947-1948): « Suspecté de communisme par les autorités de
droite, pour qui résistance est synonyme de communisme », [Suspected
of Communism by the right-wing authorities for whom resistance is synonymous
with communism] they keep a close eye on him and any contact between him and
the Greeks outside his lessons is forbidden. Back in France for the holidays he
learns in mid November that he has been banned from returning to his job in
Greece. He obtained a bursary from Recherche scientifique to write a thesis on « Le syncrétisme religieux chez Gérard de
Nerval » - which he would never finish because of leaving for the
States in September 1958 - and found
work at the Alliance française, giving papers and acting as Secretary of the
teaching committee. He also gave some lectures
at the Ecole normale supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses and the Ecole normale
supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where he lectured every week to Egyptian French
teachers who were on a professional training course in France. At last he found a job teaching contemporary French
literature in the French Civilisation programme at the Sorbonne. This was a
real triumph! [C’est un véritable triomphe]. Amongst the 400 or so foreign
students who enthusiastically attended his lecturers, some Americans from
Hollins College, Virginia – a college for young ladies from wealthy families –
arranged for him to start his full-time teaching career at Hollins. He settled
in the States, with his second wife, Jacqueline Hospitel, and their three-month-old
son Olivier in September 1958, a year before the final abolition of the 1942
decree. Àt Hollins, he taught French literature between 1958 and 1961. Then he
moved to the Western Reserve
University in Cleveland (Ohio), where, in 1966, he received the Karl Vittke
Prize for the best teaching at the university. Betwen 2006 and 2009 I was in
touch with some of his former students from Hollins and Western Reserve. They
all described his personal and intellectual influence, his astonish ability to
describe landscapes, but also the extreme tension which was always part of him
and which others who knew him, whom I met in 1991, had also mentioned. Regarding
his qualities as a teacher, one of his former students, whom I interviewed in
2006 said, word for word:

[I
know – he told me – because I would go on after him. I used to listen to him.
He would go up on stage, guided by his wife, and he would start [...]. He gave
the most beautiful literature lectures I have ever heard. I can remember
amongst others a class on Proust. [...] It was extraordinary, he had a voice
which carried, an energy, an eloquence, without undue emphasis – it really was
one of the best lectures I have ever heard in all my life.]

Like
Lusseyran’s former students, Domenach also mentioned the mystery of how Lusseyran
managed to describe the hills around Middleburry:

[I
remember something astonishing; there we were, in Vermont and he was describing
the landscape to me. Was he messing with me? Because he said ‘You see those hills…’ In fact he was
totally non-blind when he spoke. He never referred to his disability and he
would describe landscapes with a pertinence, a lyricism, but without
exaggeration. I couldn’t understand it. He could see
the hills; he could see Vermont; he could describe it better than a sighted
person could.]

In
fact, this astonishing man and great professor was such a seductive presence
that the year he received the Carl Vittke Prize, and with promotion to « full professor » awaiting him at
the beginning of the next academic year, he had to literally run away from
Cleveland with one of his most talented students, Toni Machlup, (née Berger) a
young women « d’une beauté
incroyable, réellement une des plus belles femmes que j’ai jamais vues » [of
astonishing beauty, truly one of the most beautiful young women I have ever
seen] – according to Domenach – who was married to a physics professor at the
university and who had twin baby boys. Toni had a scandalous relationship with
her French literature professor and the situation had become so difficult that
they decided to leave in July 1966, leaving their partners and children behind
them. They found refuge first of all on a Greek island, Samos where they led a
very unstable life for a year before settling with some friends of Jacques’ in Aix-en-Provence,
where he had a part-time lecturing post between November 1967 and June 1969. After
having both got divorced from their respective partners, they got married on
December 5 1969. Toni Berger, who had willingly changed her first name when she
left America, became Marie Lusseyran. In August of the same year Jacques
Lusseyran was awarded a named chair of French Literature at the university of Hawaii
where he was responsible for 500 undergraduates and 50 postgrads.

In tandem with his academic career, Jacques Lusseyran was
a prolific writer. In 1953, he published with éditions de la Table ronde an
initial version of his autobiographical work Et la lumière fut. Newspapers
and radio programmes made a great deal of this publication and in 1954, l’Académie
française awarded him the Louis Barthou prize. The same publishing house also
published an autobiographical novel, in 1954, Silence des hommes, the sequel
to his first book and in 1959 he wrote a philosophical essay, Le monde
commence aujourd'hui, which is a kind of
declaration of love to the New World where he reflects on his experiences in Buchenwald in
order to definitely free himself from them. In this work he also describes his
attachment to his job as an academic and his experience of blindness. At
Hollins, from April 1960 to May 1961, he rewrote his first two works to make a
third which has a longer timespan. This
work, again called Et la lumière fut, was dedicated to his American
hosts to whom he wrote this message :

[Joy does not come from the exterior. It is within us,
whatever happens. Light does not come from the exterior. It is within us, even
without our eyes.]

The work was translated and published in English in
1963 and then into 5 other languages between 1966 and 1982. But it was only in 1987
– 16 years after Lusseyran’s death – that this new work was at last published
in French. by Trois Arches, with nonetheless some editorial changes. Finally,
in 2005, les éditions du Félin published the original version of the text
written by Jacques Lusseyran with a preface by Jacqueline Pardon.

[An
exercise in gratitude written by a death camp survivor for a people who taught
him to nevermore be afraid; written by a Frenchman whose country did not want
him but whose genius he never stopped celebrating through his teaching.]

Sadly, this
work, where he gives us his vision of America and of campus life, a vision full
of kindness and truth, came out at a bad time, just before May 68, and has
therefore not reached a very wide audience.

During
his stay in Aix-en-Provence, from
November 1967 to June 1969, Lusseyran wrote an autobiographical novel, Le Puits ouvert, for which he could not
find a publisher. Publishers would have been interested, explained a friend of
Jacques and Marie whom I met in 2006, and to whom Jacques sent each chapter as
he wrote it, if he had agreed to make some cuts.

[Despite certain over-long passages, some enigmatic
digressions and an abundance of emotions and adjectives, [...] Le puits ouvert is a beautiful and
haunting book about the pleasures and the pains of love, about how hard it is
for a loyal character to discover his own infidelities, and about the struggle
which a body wounded by History leads to excel in the present.]

Jacques Lusseyran’s final text, Conversation
amoureuse, which he had been working on since 1970, and which he might have
rewritten if he had time, was published posthumously by éditions des Trois
Arches, in 1990. It was reprinted by éditions Triades in 2005. It is a
reflection on love using his relationships with the three women who shared his
life as his model. He addresses these passionate remarks to Marie shortly
before dying with her in a car accident on 27 July 1971, when they were on holiday in the Anjou region.

They are both buried in Juvardeil, Jacques’s mother’s village, near Angers.

Jacqueline Pardon, Jacques’s first wife, died in Paris on 16 January
2009, aged 87. Jacqueline Hospitel, his
second wife, had died 10 years previously.

As a conclusion to this long presentation, whose preparation has obliged
me to stare evil in the face, I would like to quote what Antoine Compagnon wrote
in the Preface to his anthology of texts about the First World War : La Grande Guerre des écrivains. D’Apollinaire à
Zweig :

[All war writing […] involves a descent into hell, a penitent journey,
and people do not easily recover from such an expedition. [...]
I came out of it stupefied, depressed, moved, transformed. And I imagine that this reaction will be in a way
thereaction of the reader of this collection. Reading it will not be easy: it
will be testing.]

So what can we say about those people who actually experienced
war, whether they knew the horror of the First World War trenches or the terror
of the Nazi regime? Jacques Lusseyran suggests one astonishing response, which came
from the house of the dead:

« J’ai
appris ici à aimer la vie et vous aimer plus que jamais.»

[Here I learned to love live and to love you even more than ever.]

Lusseyran, the ‘Seer’, of
whom Jean-Marie Domenach wrote in a tribute which came out in 1971 in Esprit, that he « était emporté par une espèce d’amour qui
descendait en torrent sur les êtres et les choses. » [was carried along by a kind of love which flowed in torrents
onto beings and things.’]

For me, at the very end of this paper,
I would like to share with you what my research into the Nazi terror has made
me think today: mass cruelty still exists (see the database created at Sciences
Pô by blind French historian Sémelin). Since my work on Suzanne and Taha
Hussein I regularly receive information about things happening in the near and
middle east and I am horrified by what Christians living in the east and in
parts of Africa are going through, amidst the almost total indifference of the
rest of the world, including, until very recently, French Catholics.

In addition,
after having read once again what Nazi doctors and their colleagues got up to
in the camps, I find myself questioning the implicit reasons behind French
legislation regarding euthanasia. I also wonder about work-place harassement
designed to increase production. It seems to me that the poisonous seeds sown
by the Nazis continue to bear fruit. I am not saying that they invented
everything, but they put into practice, blatantly, methodically and on a huge
scale, techniques of dehumanisation which supporters of the neo-liberal economy
now cynically exploit in the name of increased profits, dressing them up in
humanist colours if necessary : why not destroy, in the name of so-called
dignity, the old and the disabled who are reaching the end of their life and
who cost society a lot: in pensions, in benefits, in health-related expenses,
without producing anything. In short the preparation of this paper has led me
to consider in more detail than ever before, the ethical questions which occupy
today’s society. I believe that these are questions which every researcher
working in the field of Disability Studies must address sooner or later. Once
again, History, whose place is – coincidentally – being reduced day by day in
the school curriculum, seems indispensable if we are to understand the present.
On this point, I quote the great French
historian Marc Bloch, who was killed by the Nazis on l6 June 1944 at Saint Didier de
Formans : «L’ignorance du passé ne
se borne pas à nuire à la compréhension du présent ; elle compromet dans
le présent l’action même. »

[The ignorance
of the past does not only limit our understanding of the present, it also
prevents us from acting on that present.]

I would like to thank you for your attention and I would also like to
thank Jérôme Garcin, because without Le Voyant, I would perhaps never have
picked up my work on Jacques Lusseyran ; also thanks to Bruno Liesen, who
let me use the text we published together on Jacques Lusseyran in VOIR barré, in November 2009 ; to Bruno
Ronfard, who, thanks, to a recent exchange of e-mails, helped me to clarify my
thoughts on the ethical questions addressed in my conclusion, to Jacques
Sémelin, researcher at CERI and professor at the Institut des Sciences
politiques, who, in a recent speech at a ceremony celebrating his exemplary
work on civil Resistance and mass violence, and, more recently, on acts of
solidarity which save the lives of those in extreme situations, emphasised the
relationship between ethics, the sciences (specifically the social sciences)
and the key questions which inhabit our society.

About Me

I am a Reader in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. I am interested in representations of the body, more specifically disability. I am particularly interested in blindness and how the sighted and partially sighted and the blind and partially blind relate to each other. Follow me on Twitter @BlindSpotHannah